You know what else is equally dumb, but has gotten a free pass? Touchscreen interfaces in cars.
Not just touchscreens - UI design for cars in general, especially any sort of "multifunction" button that requires you to look at a display in order to know what it is going to do.
Pretty much all car audio design is crap in that respect. Personal favourites that I have run in to (or have nearly made me run into things) include:
Radio with 25% of the limited facia space occupied by big shiny bezel around a big doomsday-grade button for... toggling the audio enhancement mode. Buttons for selecting the source, changing channel etc. were scratty little things.
One radio that started beeping when it lost its auto-tune lock on a station. Not just any beep but a beep that got louder, louder, louder and LOUDER... forget avoiding those pedestrians and oncoming traffic because THE RADIO HAS LOST ITS AUTO-TUNE LOCK! My god, man, you're driving without the aid of soft rock and unhelpful traffic information - do something!
Anything with blue LED illumination. There's a reason why they use red lighting in submarine movies, morons! The device in question did have two brightness settings: blinding or merely dazzling. (See also other people's xenon headlights)
Do they really think this is going to be an issue? Al Qaeda with an EMP?
Don't you learn from history? These sophisticated terrorists have already shown how they can cause death and destruction with high-tech weapons like... er... half-a-dozen $5 box cutters...
Of course, it is always much easier to defeat an evil genius with complex gadgets and elaborate plans for world domination than defend against an ordinary guy with a sack of fertiliser. Its awfully worrying when you raid the master criminal's lair expecting to find a NASA-like mission control, a monorail and a clutch of beautiful female assassins, but all you find is an iPhone, a frequent flyer card and a porno mag.
I can understand them wanting to make a change but I don't understand why they include an incompatible GCC.
Probably just a stop-gap until everybody fixes their makefiles to use Clang rather than GCC. GCC is still the default command-line compiler. There's still a heap of open-source stuff in OS X (Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, Postgresql,...) and also projects like MacPorts that enable you to compile most of the usual open-source suspects. Since these are mostly cross-platform, I'd assume that inline assembler is fairly rare, but build scripts that depend on GCC are fairly common.
I'd guess the LLVM backend is for interoperability with Clang (which uses LLVM, right?).
Complaining about the GPL is like complaining that you can't play dirty pool with code licensing(see Tivoization).
I haven't heard Apple complaining about the GPL or trying to circumvent it - they're just switching to alternative projects.
Of course, its a pity, because even if if you Tivoized GPLv2 code you still had to share your source so people could learn from it, or use and modify it on other (or jailbroken) hardware, whereas now people are moving to BSD-style licenses with no such benefits... but if the FSF want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, declare jihad on Tivoization and have a tilt at the patent windmill, that is their right.
Indeed, until recently, most people would have risked higher sodium levels to avoid food poisoning.
Until recently, most people didn't have refrigeration, a year-round supply of fresh food, or much expectation of living beyond 70.
Anyway, salt beef isn't a problem if you eat it with a mouldy turnip and a lump of stale bread. Its when you eat it with Granny's (tm) homestyle oven-ready turnip in light batter (with added salt) and a couple of slices of Braithwaite's Healthy (tm) Wholemeal-style Family Loaf (with now't taken out - but a shedload of salt put in to keep it moist) that it all starts to add up.
Furthermore, the words "work" and "weight" existed before their scientific meanings were defined.
Pretty sure that that words "chemical" and "chemistry" both descend from "alchemy" which certainly pre-dates any modern understanding of what a "chemical" is.
Unless we are in space, or on another planet, the colloquial meaning of "weight" is perfectly compatible with the scientific meaning.
...until some pedant insists that your "kitchen science" experiment (that is successfully getting young kids to start to engage in a systematic investigation) is "wrong" because the kitchen scales measure "weight" in grams rather than Newtons. There lies the road to elementary school science and math textbooks with a reading age of 14...
That means you can prove that a "chemical" is safe scientifically, and the public won't listen.
Some of that blame lies with the people who told us that nuclear power would produce electricity too cheap to meter, that cigarettes wouldn't harm our throats, that asbestos was the building material of the future, that thalidomide was a great anti-nausea drug, that a 1m-wide strip ploughed around a field would prevent cross-pollination of GM crops, that feeding sheep carcasses to cows was perfectly safe and humans couldn't catch BSE (one UK politician even publicly fed a burger to his kid to prove it).
If a supposedly reputable scientist can cause a bogus health scare by schilling for ambulance-chasing lawyers (and get published in a supposedly reputable journal), then its equally believable that they could cover up a genuine issue by schilling for industry. No wonder the public are confused.
Much like HD televisions, the majority of which until quite recently were never used with HD media even when it was available, 4G seems like something that a purchaser either knows what it is at a technical level or they are blissfully unaware of it.
Well, there was a bit of a fuss when TVs started to be sold as "HD Ready" (Example 1Example 2 - I'm sure there are more where those came from.)
Meanwhile, like many people, I bought a TV with an integrated terrestrial HD tuner about a year before HD broadcasts were due to start in my area. When my local transmitter switched, lo and behold I got HD. I didn't get some excuse along the lines of "well, when we said HD, we didn't mean the sort of HD that was coming in your area."
Likewise, there is much talk of 4G "coming soon" to the UK. Around the time of the iPad launch, there was even talk of 4G arriving later this year (although that's fallen through). Some UK carrier sites talk of 4G coming soon (and, by the way, a quick perusal of the Ofcom website shows that, in the UK context, 4G means "LTE or WiMax" not HSDPA+ etc. as some US carriers are spinning it). So, it would have been quite reasonable to expect that an "iPad with 4G" would work with 4G when it arrived. At the time, the only way you'd know that this was not true is if you'd dug the actual supported frequencies out of the tech specs page and compared them with the proposed UK/EU 4G frequencies - that's not the sort of research you should expect to do when buying a consumer-oriented device.
Apple have since had several rounds of refinement to their small print so its a bit clearer bit, last time I looked, they still didn't come clean and say "this will not work on existing or proposed 4G networks outside of North America".
If Apple were a Mom&Pop company in the US exporting a few units to the EU this would be excusable - but when you have major distribution and retail networks in a country, and produce otherwise fully localized goods for those markets there is no excuse for selling them as "iPad with 4G*" <font size="-2">*doesn't actually do 4G in this country</font>.
Although it might not hurt Apple much, this might set a precident to dissuade other firms from selling stuff as "4G" when it isn't.
(Of course, some blame also applies to the supposedly international - but really US-centric - standards bodies who have let "4G" mean different things in different markets - I could buy my TV with confidence because the UK had got the "Freeview HD" branding sorted out in advance).
Isn't this just a case of colloquial vs. technical language?
I think most non-technical folk associate the term "chemical" with artificially manufactured or extracted substances not usually encountered in our little corner of nature. Colloquial meanings often differ from modern technical usage (see also "organic", "work", "weight"). Words mean different things in different contexts - deal with it.
By all means challenge specific cases of "chemophobia" but you won't win any hearts and minds by telling people they're stupid because they don't use the same definition of "chemical" as you.
Also, remember the hidden wisdom of the old "dihydrogenmonoxide" joke: there ain't no such thing as a "harmless substance" and anything can be toxic or dangerous if too much of it turns up in the wrong place at the wrong time. I mean, harmless old Sodium Chloride might not seem a problem until every food manufacturer starts adding it in huge quantities to make their product tastier without paying for more expensive spices.
Last time I checked (volunteered teaching kids to program last year), Scratch was not cloud based. There is a website that has some featured programs, but the platform runs on a local machine with local files and all.
Sorry, you're right, I misremembered. Anyway, Scratch works fine on a regular PC, and its bizzare to argue that people who can't install (or trust their kids to install) an application can somehow set up (or trust their kids to set up) a bare board Linux computer.
You seem to be a techie who never had to deal with NORMAL PEOPLE - the 99% - who count being able to log into Yahoo webmail & Facebook as major technical acomplishments..
I've certainly dealt with such people and know exactly how much hand-holding they need to to simple things. Yet somehow you're expecting people who can't log in to a website to re-flash a Raspberry Pi instead? If you can make that click-n-drool, you can produce an equally click-and-drool installer for a virtual machine. Most would run a mile as soon as they saw the current Pi and convince themselves that they'd wreck the TV by plugging it in.
You seem to be assuming that SETI is expecting to find radio leakage from other worlds.
Ahem. From my original post: We'd be relying on them being monumentally stupid enough to deliberately broadcast easily-decoded signals saying "Here we are!". Any failure of SETI to detect such signals could mean either (a) the civilizations aren't there or (b) they're not inclined to send out calling-cards. Since we're almost paranoid enough to reject any large-scale attempt to say Hi to our neighbours it would hardly be stretching the principle of mediocrity if (b) was the prevalent view.
Whether a beacon would use such primitive methods would depend on whether they want to communicate with primitive societies.
Even our primitive society has come up with the notion that it might be a Bad Idea for an advanced civilization to contact a primitive society.
99% of the parents owning a PC would not be able to do this for their kid.
99% of kids who are motivated to learn programming at home could show their parents exactly what to do.
Scratch is cloud-based: just make sure that your net-nanny software lets junior to get at the Scratch website. If kids can get at Facebook, Wikipedia or their school intranet, they can get at Scratch (or any cloud-based programming environment anybody wants to set up).
A "Virtual Pi" system would be as simple as (1) install VirtualBox, (2) install a "virtual appliance" containing an x86 version of the Pi image - if that isn't easy enough someone could bundle up the free version of VirtualBox and the image in a one-click installer.
I was looking yesterday if some company expanding a little on Raspberry Pi. Add LCD, serial ports, connection for WiFi boards and you are on par with many dev boards and SBCs that are sold for hundreds of $$.
...except that will start pushing up the price, which is the Pi's way of grabbing attention.
Let's face it, there is nothing particularly revolutionary, hardware-wise, about the Pi. The important thing is that its so cheap that people will buy it first, and find out what it can do for them later. This is harking back to the days when the British PC market was dominated by British-designed machines like the BBC Model B - which the Pi makers invoke - and the Sinclair Spectrum/ZX81 which are actually more obviously relevant to the Pi because they were incredibly cheap. Actually, the BBC Micro was also incredibly cheap compared with the (inflated) UK price of an Apple II (the sensible comparison - the BBC ended up occupying the same niche in the UK that the Apple II did in the US), but it wasn't as affordable as the ZXs.
A more realistic way of teaching kids to program is to use Scratch, Python or (insert language of choice) on a regular desktop or a tablet - sandboxing it as a web app or a virtual machine if you worry about kids "breaking" things. You have to provide PSU, monitor, keyboard mouse, network to use a Pi, and there are other reasons for getting regular PCs or tablets onto kid's desks. However, if the Pi can generate interest by appealing to the ZX81 spirit then what's not to like?
The fly in the ointment is that its simply not economical to actually make the things in the UK.
Why can't their be "life" on planets that would cook us alive?
Because meat tastes much better when it has been properly aged before cooking. Anyway, humans are full of saturated fats and artificial additives.
But seriously folks - its easy to speculate about forms of "life" beyond our imagination, but if you're talking about trying to find life on exoplanets simply by estimating their surface conditions or maybe, if you are lucky, a bit of spectroscopic data about the atmosphere then the only signs you could look for are the ones you know to be associated with "life as we know it" - temperatures around the triple point of water, surplus oxygen it the atmosphere etc.
Even radio signals rely on assumptions: we might be able to spot analogue signals from other planets, but we're only (ballpark) 100 years into radio and already we're switching to highly compressed digital formats that would be hard to distinguish from random noise. If that is "typical" then what are the chances than our nearest neighbors are at that very short window in their technological development? We'd be relying on them being monumentally stupid enough to deliberately broadcast easily-decoded signals saying "Here we are! We taste great flash-fried with qur'klozle sauce and fresg g'flona!".
Will the removal of DRM flatten out those pricing peaks and troughs? Will the eBook version go up or down? That will determine if piracy goes up or down.
The value will go up: I don't have to worry about Amazon going bust (...I still re-read paperbacks I bought in the 1970s - even if I survive another 40 years, I doubt my Kindle will) because I can format-shift stuff and I can "lend" (a.k.a. give) books to friends.
The last might sound like a way of losing sales, but how many of the authors who you buy regularly did you discover via a loan? How many bands who's music you buy were you introduced to via a dodgey C90*?
There's also a lot of cheap books on amazon by self-published authors -and once you start the "also read..." links lead you to others. I've bough a few (because at £1 or so a pop what's to lose?) and so far none of them have been eye-gougingly bad (I've certainly paid full whack for worse) and most of them have been, at the very least, entertaining. This might start to have downward pressure on prices.
(*if you don't know what a C90 is GET OFF MY LAWN!)
The judge is right, there's no real viable way the bank can protect against this, even more modern protection schemes involving SMS messages still involve the enduser, and if he happily provides the received code to www.illtakeyourmoneythanks.ru despite numerous warnings from the bank.
For years, my bank (not one of the world's greatest) has used challenge/response chip-and-PIN authentication, using a small card reader provided free by the bank. You put your card into the reader and enter your PIN, punch in the challenge number given by the website, then type the response code into the website (the reader isn't interfaced with the computer at all), You need to do this every time you add a new payee via online banking. I'm sure its hackable by a sufficiently sophisticated attack, but not your garden variety phishing expedition.
I'd want to look a bit more about the bank's practices before passing judgement about the client's stupidity. My bank likes to cold-call me and "ask a few security questions" - and gets quite nonplussed when I tell them to go fish (I know its my bank because, on one occasion, I had a letter from them reassuring me that the call was legit...). The URL for the e-banking site has no obvious connection with the name of the bank, and even the extended SSL certificate refers to the parent company (which is fairly common knowledge, but still...). Other online services I've encountered do clever things like sending out emails with live weblinks in them and, to add the cherry on top, are indirected via some analytics or marketing firm so they look like "http://www.somelogisticsoutfit.in?addr=www.legitcompany.com" - how exactly is Mr Average Joe expected to distinguish that from "http://www.evilphishers.ru?victim=www.legitcompany.com"? As for the last time I paid my TV License online (this is the UK) they couldn't have made the process look more like a trojan attack if they had tried.
...and why banks still use the same fixed account code for withdrawals, deposits, direct debits and electronic transfers, who knows? How hard can it be to give me a one-time account code to pass to someone who wants to wire me money or set up a direct debit?
There is a reason why books are 24.99 on Apple or Amazon?
There's a particularly stupid reason in the UK (and most of the EU?) - paper books are exempt from VAT (sales tax) but ebook prices include VAT at 20%. So even though the net price of ebooks is lower than paper books the actual price still ends up the same or higher.
I agree that you shouldn't pirate the book using DRM as an excuse, but...
You should buy the book anyway and send an email to the company explaining why their system is counter-productive.
...as long as you buy the book, your email will go straight in the trash. No: the correct protest action is that you should go without the book and deprive the publisher of the sale.
If you can't, buy the book and remove the DRM afterwards if you like and stop falsely complaining that you can't device-shift your collection.
Except that by doing that you have almost certainly breached the publisher's EULA and - at least from their point of view (whatever your local DMCA and fair use laws say) - are just as evil as someone who downloaded a pirate copy.
Building asteroid mining equipment, refineries and crude re-entry vehicles in space so that future asteroid mining doesn't have to cover the massive costs of launching every last nut and bolt you need for every mission into orbit.
Let's see: Using more screen real estate at the top of the window just as the industry is moving to 16:9, 1080p screens with more horizontal space: FAIL. (especially c.f. the palette used in the previous Mac version).
Dynamically hiding icons or drastically changing their appearance depending on the window width.... have wide/narrow layouts maybe, but continually juggle the layout as you resize? FAIL.
With two such fundamental design fails, Is there a need to go any further?
(There's also the nice new equation editor that only works in one font, Callibri, when most of the universe specifies either Times or TeX Computer Modern for equations, but that's not a ribbon fail).
I've used lots of equipment and it's all seemed just as cumbersome.
YMMV. There's clearly a problem here, but its in the implementation rather than the system. Based on my previous TV I'd have agreed with you completely (that TV also had a very good analogue "Fasttext" implementation which cached sub-pages and often-visited pages for smooth browsing) . My current TV works perfectly and I haven't used analogue teletext since I bought it. I suspect there's not enough demand to make it worth manufacturers spending time on, with only the BBC offering any significant content, and EPG functionality moved elsewhere.
I would put that down to style rather than capabilities, they seem to have gone with sparse screens with a lot of sub-pages.
Probably because it is designed to be read from a distance and not assume that everybody has a 50" HD telly, while still accommodating picture-in-picture so you can browse and watch telly. Also, when Ceefax started in the 70s it was a unique way to get continuously updated news. The new digital service, since its inception, has been targeting an increasingly narrow niche between the web and 24-hour news channels, and will soon be obsoleted by news apps on smart TVs.
The main problem is that it has been blighted by piss-poor implementations on some receivers. Also, its pretty clear that the funding has been continuously salami-sliced over the last 10 years or so, even for Ceefax (and the ITV version, Teletext, packed up years ago). In comparison, Teletext sets had been getting quite smart - caching commonly visited pages and sub-pages to speed up access.
The real question is why is anyone still getting their news this way?
Because if you want to check the news headlines, travel news, sports results or TV listings (on analogue) while sitting in the comfy chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit, Teletext does the job rather well. You don't need to get up and turn on the computer or get biscuit-y fingerprints over your tablet/laptop, and even if your new smart TV has a web browser, web pages are mostly desiged for use on a computer screen with a mouse.
Oh, yes, and since its been around since the 1970s (when it really was cutting edge) so people are in the habit of using it. The content has been going downhill for the last ten years, and one of the main services closed completely, though.
If you add to this the fact that the only reasonable way to navigate to pages is via a deep menu system of pages (each page taking up to 30 seconds to load), rather than being able to memorise a three digit number for the page, it becomes too painful to actually use at all.
Not true - at least on the BBC service you can navigate between the main sections using page numbers (they're actually vaguely compatible with the old Ceefax numbers - 102 for news, 300 for sport etc.)
Also, the speed issue is down to bad implementations on some hardware. On My first digital TV, a Phillips widescreen CRT (relatively early for a integrated digital TV) it was buggy and unusable, and I wouldoften switch back to analog to use Ceefax or Teletext. My newer Samsung LCD does it properly and gives a service that is much better than the old system. The split screen works wellon modern large, widescreen, hi def TVs.
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You know what else is equally dumb, but has gotten a free pass? Touchscreen interfaces in cars.
Not just touchscreens - UI design for cars in general, especially any sort of "multifunction" button that requires you to look at a display in order to know what it is going to do.
Pretty much all car audio design is crap in that respect. Personal favourites that I have run in to (or have nearly made me run into things) include:
Do they really think this is going to be an issue? Al Qaeda with an EMP?
Don't you learn from history? These sophisticated terrorists have already shown how they can cause death and destruction with high-tech weapons like... er... half-a-dozen $5 box cutters...
Of course, it is always much easier to defeat an evil genius with complex gadgets and elaborate plans for world domination than defend against an ordinary guy with a sack of fertiliser. Its awfully worrying when you raid the master criminal's lair expecting to find a NASA-like mission control, a monorail and a clutch of beautiful female assassins, but all you find is an iPhone, a frequent flyer card and a porno mag.
He added: “I can go for a run and it won’t come off. I’ve already taken it to the gym and jogged with it on.”'"
"Better still, my arthritis has completely cleared up, there's no chalk in my kettle and my car is now getting twice as many miles to the gallon..."
Just hope this guy never needs a MRI scan...
I can understand them wanting to make a change but I don't understand why they include an incompatible GCC.
Probably just a stop-gap until everybody fixes their makefiles to use Clang rather than GCC. GCC is still the default command-line compiler. There's still a heap of open-source stuff in OS X (Apache, PHP, Perl, Python, Postgresql,...) and also projects like MacPorts that enable you to compile most of the usual open-source suspects. Since these are mostly cross-platform, I'd assume that inline assembler is fairly rare, but build scripts that depend on GCC are fairly common.
I'd guess the LLVM backend is for interoperability with Clang (which uses LLVM, right?).
Complaining about the GPL is like complaining that you can't play dirty pool with code licensing(see Tivoization).
I haven't heard Apple complaining about the GPL or trying to circumvent it - they're just switching to alternative projects.
Of course, its a pity, because even if if you Tivoized GPLv2 code you still had to share your source so people could learn from it, or use and modify it on other (or jailbroken) hardware, whereas now people are moving to BSD-style licenses with no such benefits... but if the FSF want to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, declare jihad on Tivoization and have a tilt at the patent windmill, that is their right.
Indeed, until recently, most people would have risked higher sodium levels to avoid food poisoning.
Until recently, most people didn't have refrigeration, a year-round supply of fresh food, or much expectation of living beyond 70.
Anyway, salt beef isn't a problem if you eat it with a mouldy turnip and a lump of stale bread. Its when you eat it with Granny's (tm) homestyle oven-ready turnip in light batter (with added salt) and a couple of slices of Braithwaite's Healthy (tm) Wholemeal-style Family Loaf (with now't taken out - but a shedload of salt put in to keep it moist) that it all starts to add up.
Furthermore, the words "work" and "weight" existed before their scientific meanings were defined.
Pretty sure that that words "chemical" and "chemistry" both descend from "alchemy" which certainly pre-dates any modern understanding of what a "chemical" is.
Unless we are in space, or on another planet, the colloquial meaning of "weight" is perfectly compatible with the scientific meaning.
...until some pedant insists that your "kitchen science" experiment (that is successfully getting young kids to start to engage in a systematic investigation) is "wrong" because the kitchen scales measure "weight" in grams rather than Newtons. There lies the road to elementary school science and math textbooks with a reading age of 14...
That means you can prove that a "chemical" is safe scientifically, and the public won't listen.
Some of that blame lies with the people who told us that nuclear power would produce electricity too cheap to meter, that cigarettes wouldn't harm our throats, that asbestos was the building material of the future, that thalidomide was a great anti-nausea drug, that a 1m-wide strip ploughed around a field would prevent cross-pollination of GM crops, that feeding sheep carcasses to cows was perfectly safe and humans couldn't catch BSE (one UK politician even publicly fed a burger to his kid to prove it).
If a supposedly reputable scientist can cause a bogus health scare by schilling for ambulance-chasing lawyers (and get published in a supposedly reputable journal), then its equally believable that they could cover up a genuine issue by schilling for industry. No wonder the public are confused.
Much like HD televisions, the majority of which until quite recently were never used with HD media even when it was available, 4G seems like something that a purchaser either knows what it is at a technical level or they are blissfully unaware of it.
Well, there was a bit of a fuss when TVs started to be sold as "HD Ready" (Example 1 Example 2 - I'm sure there are more where those came from.)
Meanwhile, like many people, I bought a TV with an integrated terrestrial HD tuner about a year before HD broadcasts were due to start in my area. When my local transmitter switched, lo and behold I got HD. I didn't get some excuse along the lines of "well, when we said HD, we didn't mean the sort of HD that was coming in your area."
Likewise, there is much talk of 4G "coming soon" to the UK. Around the time of the iPad launch, there was even talk of 4G arriving later this year (although that's fallen through). Some UK carrier sites talk of 4G coming soon (and, by the way, a quick perusal of the Ofcom website shows that, in the UK context, 4G means "LTE or WiMax" not HSDPA+ etc. as some US carriers are spinning it). So, it would have been quite reasonable to expect that an "iPad with 4G" would work with 4G when it arrived. At the time, the only way you'd know that this was not true is if you'd dug the actual supported frequencies out of the tech specs page and compared them with the proposed UK/EU 4G frequencies - that's not the sort of research you should expect to do when buying a consumer-oriented device.
Apple have since had several rounds of refinement to their small print so its a bit clearer bit, last time I looked, they still didn't come clean and say "this will not work on existing or proposed 4G networks outside of North America".
If Apple were a Mom&Pop company in the US exporting a few units to the EU this would be excusable - but when you have major distribution and retail networks in a country, and produce otherwise fully localized goods for those markets there is no excuse for selling them as "iPad with 4G*" <font size="-2">*doesn't actually do 4G in this country</font>.
Although it might not hurt Apple much, this might set a precident to dissuade other firms from selling stuff as "4G" when it isn't.
(Of course, some blame also applies to the supposedly international - but really US-centric - standards bodies who have let "4G" mean different things in different markets - I could buy my TV with confidence because the UK had got the "Freeview HD" branding sorted out in advance).
Isn't this just a case of colloquial vs. technical language?
I think most non-technical folk associate the term "chemical" with artificially manufactured or extracted substances not usually encountered in our little corner of nature. Colloquial meanings often differ from modern technical usage (see also "organic", "work", "weight"). Words mean different things in different contexts - deal with it.
By all means challenge specific cases of "chemophobia" but you won't win any hearts and minds by telling people they're stupid because they don't use the same definition of "chemical" as you.
Also, remember the hidden wisdom of the old "dihydrogenmonoxide" joke: there ain't no such thing as a "harmless substance" and anything can be toxic or dangerous if too much of it turns up in the wrong place at the wrong time. I mean, harmless old Sodium Chloride might not seem a problem until every food manufacturer starts adding it in huge quantities to make their product tastier without paying for more expensive spices.
Last time I checked (volunteered teaching kids to program last year), Scratch was not cloud based. There is a website that has some featured programs, but the platform runs on a local machine with local files and all.
Sorry, you're right, I misremembered. Anyway, Scratch works fine on a regular PC, and its bizzare to argue that people who can't install (or trust their kids to install) an application can somehow set up (or trust their kids to set up) a bare board Linux computer.
You seem to be a techie who never had to deal with NORMAL PEOPLE - the 99% - who count being able to log into Yahoo webmail & Facebook as major technical acomplishments..
I've certainly dealt with such people and know exactly how much hand-holding they need to to simple things. Yet somehow you're expecting people who can't log in to a website to re-flash a Raspberry Pi instead? If you can make that click-n-drool, you can produce an equally click-and-drool installer for a virtual machine. Most would run a mile as soon as they saw the current Pi and convince themselves that they'd wreck the TV by plugging it in.
You seem to be assuming that SETI is expecting to find radio leakage from other worlds.
Ahem. From my original post: We'd be relying on them being monumentally stupid enough to deliberately broadcast easily-decoded signals saying "Here we are!". Any failure of SETI to detect such signals could mean either (a) the civilizations aren't there or (b) they're not inclined to send out calling-cards. Since we're almost paranoid enough to reject any large-scale attempt to say Hi to our neighbours it would hardly be stretching the principle of mediocrity if (b) was the prevalent view.
Whether a beacon would use such primitive methods would depend on whether they want to communicate with primitive societies.
Even our primitive society has come up with the notion that it might be a Bad Idea for an advanced civilization to contact a primitive society.
99% of the parents owning a PC would not be able to do this for their kid.
99% of kids who are motivated to learn programming at home could show their parents exactly what to do.
Scratch is cloud-based: just make sure that your net-nanny software lets junior to get at the Scratch website. If kids can get at Facebook, Wikipedia or their school intranet, they can get at Scratch (or any cloud-based programming environment anybody wants to set up).
A "Virtual Pi" system would be as simple as (1) install VirtualBox, (2) install a "virtual appliance" containing an x86 version of the Pi image - if that isn't easy enough someone could bundle up the free version of VirtualBox and the image in a one-click installer.
I was looking yesterday if some company expanding a little on Raspberry Pi. Add LCD, serial ports, connection for WiFi boards and you are on par with many dev boards and SBCs that are sold for hundreds of $$.
...except that will start pushing up the price, which is the Pi's way of grabbing attention.
Let's face it, there is nothing particularly revolutionary, hardware-wise, about the Pi. The important thing is that its so cheap that people will buy it first, and find out what it can do for them later. This is harking back to the days when the British PC market was dominated by British-designed machines like the BBC Model B - which the Pi makers invoke - and the Sinclair Spectrum/ZX81 which are actually more obviously relevant to the Pi because they were incredibly cheap. Actually, the BBC Micro was also incredibly cheap compared with the (inflated) UK price of an Apple II (the sensible comparison - the BBC ended up occupying the same niche in the UK that the Apple II did in the US), but it wasn't as affordable as the ZXs.
A more realistic way of teaching kids to program is to use Scratch, Python or (insert language of choice) on a regular desktop or a tablet - sandboxing it as a web app or a virtual machine if you worry about kids "breaking" things. You have to provide PSU, monitor, keyboard mouse, network to use a Pi, and there are other reasons for getting regular PCs or tablets onto kid's desks. However, if the Pi can generate interest by appealing to the ZX81 spirit then what's not to like?
The fly in the ointment is that its simply not economical to actually make the things in the UK.
Why can't their be "life" on planets that would cook us alive?
Because meat tastes much better when it has been properly aged before cooking. Anyway, humans are full of saturated fats and artificial additives.
But seriously folks - its easy to speculate about forms of "life" beyond our imagination, but if you're talking about trying to find life on exoplanets simply by estimating their surface conditions or maybe, if you are lucky, a bit of spectroscopic data about the atmosphere then the only signs you could look for are the ones you know to be associated with "life as we know it" - temperatures around the triple point of water, surplus oxygen it the atmosphere etc.
Even radio signals rely on assumptions: we might be able to spot analogue signals from other planets, but we're only (ballpark) 100 years into radio and already we're switching to highly compressed digital formats that would be hard to distinguish from random noise. If that is "typical" then what are the chances than our nearest neighbors are at that very short window in their technological development? We'd be relying on them being monumentally stupid enough to deliberately broadcast easily-decoded signals saying "Here we are! We taste great flash-fried with qur'klozle sauce and fresg g'flona!".
Will the removal of DRM flatten out those pricing peaks and troughs? Will the eBook version go up or down? That will determine if piracy goes up or down.
The value will go up: I don't have to worry about Amazon going bust (...I still re-read paperbacks I bought in the 1970s - even if I survive another 40 years, I doubt my Kindle will) because I can format-shift stuff and I can "lend" (a.k.a. give) books to friends.
The last might sound like a way of losing sales, but how many of the authors who you buy regularly did you discover via a loan? How many bands who's music you buy were you introduced to via a dodgey C90*?
There's also a lot of cheap books on amazon by self-published authors -and once you start the "also read..." links lead you to others. I've bough a few (because at £1 or so a pop what's to lose?) and so far none of them have been eye-gougingly bad (I've certainly paid full whack for worse) and most of them have been, at the very least, entertaining. This might start to have downward pressure on prices.
(*if you don't know what a C90 is GET OFF MY LAWN!)
The judge is right, there's no real viable way the bank can protect against this, even more modern protection schemes involving SMS messages still involve the enduser, and if he happily provides the received code to www.illtakeyourmoneythanks.ru despite numerous warnings from the bank.
For years, my bank (not one of the world's greatest) has used challenge/response chip-and-PIN authentication, using a small card reader provided free by the bank. You put your card into the reader and enter your PIN, punch in the challenge number given by the website, then type the response code into the website (the reader isn't interfaced with the computer at all), You need to do this every time you add a new payee via online banking. I'm sure its hackable by a sufficiently sophisticated attack, but not your garden variety phishing expedition.
I'd want to look a bit more about the bank's practices before passing judgement about the client's stupidity. My bank likes to cold-call me and "ask a few security questions" - and gets quite nonplussed when I tell them to go fish (I know its my bank because, on one occasion, I had a letter from them reassuring me that the call was legit...). The URL for the e-banking site has no obvious connection with the name of the bank, and even the extended SSL certificate refers to the parent company (which is fairly common knowledge, but still...). Other online services I've encountered do clever things like sending out emails with live weblinks in them and, to add the cherry on top, are indirected via some analytics or marketing firm so they look like "http://www.somelogisticsoutfit.in?addr=www.legitcompany.com" - how exactly is Mr Average Joe expected to distinguish that from "http://www.evilphishers.ru?victim=www.legitcompany.com"? As for the last time I paid my TV License online (this is the UK) they couldn't have made the process look more like a trojan attack if they had tried.
...and why banks still use the same fixed account code for withdrawals, deposits, direct debits and electronic transfers, who knows? How hard can it be to give me a one-time account code to pass to someone who wants to wire me money or set up a direct debit?
There is a reason why books are 24.99 on Apple or Amazon?
There's a particularly stupid reason in the UK (and most of the EU?) - paper books are exempt from VAT (sales tax) but ebook prices include VAT at 20%. So even though the net price of ebooks is lower than paper books the actual price still ends up the same or higher.
I agree that you shouldn't pirate the book using DRM as an excuse, but...
You should buy the book anyway and send an email to the company explaining why their system is counter-productive.
...as long as you buy the book, your email will go straight in the trash. No: the correct protest action is that you should go without the book and deprive the publisher of the sale.
If you can't, buy the book and remove the DRM afterwards if you like and stop falsely complaining that you can't device-shift your collection.
Except that by doing that you have almost certainly breached the publisher's EULA and - at least from their point of view (whatever your local DMCA and fair use laws say) - are just as evil as someone who downloaded a pirate copy.
Which is needed for ... ?
Building asteroid mining equipment, refineries and crude re-entry vehicles in space so that future asteroid mining doesn't have to cover the massive costs of launching every last nut and bolt you need for every mission into orbit.
Let's see:
Using more screen real estate at the top of the window just as the industry is moving to 16:9, 1080p screens with more horizontal space: FAIL. (especially c.f. the palette used in the previous Mac version).
Dynamically hiding icons or drastically changing their appearance depending on the window width.... have wide/narrow layouts maybe, but continually juggle the layout as you resize? FAIL.
With two such fundamental design fails, Is there a need to go any further?
(There's also the nice new equation editor that only works in one font, Callibri, when most of the universe specifies either Times or TeX Computer Modern for equations, but that's not a ribbon fail).
I've used lots of equipment and it's all seemed just as cumbersome.
YMMV. There's clearly a problem here, but its in the implementation rather than the system. Based on my previous TV I'd have agreed with you completely (that TV also had a very good analogue "Fasttext" implementation which cached sub-pages and often-visited pages for smooth browsing) . My current TV works perfectly and I haven't used analogue teletext since I bought it. I suspect there's not enough demand to make it worth manufacturers spending time on, with only the BBC offering any significant content, and EPG functionality moved elsewhere.
I would put that down to style rather than capabilities, they seem to have gone with sparse screens with a lot of sub-pages.
Probably because it is designed to be read from a distance and not assume that everybody has a 50" HD telly, while still accommodating picture-in-picture so you can browse and watch telly. Also, when Ceefax started in the 70s it was a unique way to get continuously updated news. The new digital service, since its inception, has been targeting an increasingly narrow niche between the web and 24-hour news channels, and will soon be obsoleted by news apps on smart TVs.
The main problem is that it has been blighted by piss-poor implementations on some receivers. Also, its pretty clear that the funding has been continuously salami-sliced over the last 10 years or so, even for Ceefax (and the ITV version, Teletext, packed up years ago). In comparison, Teletext sets had been getting quite smart - caching commonly visited pages and sub-pages to speed up access.
The real question is why is anyone still getting their news this way?
Because if you want to check the news headlines, travel news, sports results or TV listings (on analogue) while sitting in the comfy chair with a cup of tea and a biscuit, Teletext does the job rather well. You don't need to get up and turn on the computer or get biscuit-y fingerprints over your tablet/laptop, and even if your new smart TV has a web browser, web pages are mostly desiged for use on a computer screen with a mouse.
Oh, yes, and since its been around since the 1970s (when it really was cutting edge) so people are in the habit of using it. The content has been going downhill for the last ten years, and one of the main services closed completely, though.
If you add to this the fact that the only reasonable way to navigate to pages is via a deep menu system of pages (each page taking up to 30 seconds to load), rather than being able to memorise a three digit number for the page, it becomes too painful to actually use at all.
Not true - at least on the BBC service you can navigate between the main sections using page numbers (they're actually vaguely compatible with the old Ceefax numbers - 102 for news, 300 for sport etc.)
Also, the speed issue is down to bad implementations on some hardware. On My first digital TV, a Phillips widescreen CRT (relatively early for a integrated digital TV) it was buggy and unusable, and I wouldoften switch back to analog to use Ceefax or Teletext. My newer Samsung LCD does it properly and gives a service that is much better than the old system. The split screen works wellon modern large, widescreen, hi def TVs.